Chapter 16

His sisters came up at once, and his father followed a moment later. They all took their cue from the mother's gaiety, and began talking and laughing, except the father, who sat looking on with a smile at their lively spirits and the jokes of which Dan became the victim. Each family has its own fantastic medium, in which it gets affairs to relieve them of their concrete seriousness, and the Maverings now did this with Dan's engagement, and played with it as an airy abstraction. They debated the character of the embassy which was to be sent down to Boston on their behalf, and it was decided that Eunice had better go with her father, as representing more fully the age and respectability of the family: at first glance the Pasmers would take her for Dan's mother, and this would be a tremendous advantage.

“And if I like the ridiculous little chit,” said Eunice, “I think I shall let Dan marry her at once. I see no reason why he shouldn't and I couldn't stand a long engagement; I should break it off.”

“I guess there are others who will have something to say about that,” retorted the younger sister. “I've always wanted a long engagement in this family, and as there seems to be no chance for it with the ladies, I wish to make the most of Dan's. I always like it where the hero gets sick and the heroine nurses him. I want Dan to get sick, and have Alice come here and take care of him.”

“No; this marriage must take place at once. What do you say, father?” asked Eunice.

Her father sat, enjoying the talk, at the foot of the bed, with a tendency to doze. “You might ask Dan,” he said, with a lazy cast of his eye toward his son.

“Dan has nothing to do with it.”

“Dan shall not be consulted.”

The two girls stormed upon their father with their different reasons.

“Now I will tell you Girls, be still!” their mother broke in. “Listen to me: I have an idea.”

“Listen to her: she has an idea!” echoed Eunice, in recitative.

“Will you be quiet?” demanded the mother.

“We will be du-u-mb!”

When they became so, at the verge of their mother's patience, of which they knew the limits, she went on: “I think Dan had better get married at once.”

“There, Minnie!”

“But what does Dan say?”

“I will--make the sacrifice,” said Dan meekly.

“Noble boy! That's exactly what Washington said to his mother when she asked him not to go to sea,” said Minnie.

“And then he went into the militia, and made it all right with himself that way,” said Eunice. “Dan can't play his filial piety on this family. Go on, mother.”

“I want him to bring his wife home, and live with us,” continued his mother.

“In the L part!” cried Minnie, clasping her hands in rapture. “I've always said what a perfect little apartment it was by itself.”

“Well, don't say it again, then,” returned her sister. “Always is often enough. Well, in the L part Go on, mother! Don't ask where you were, when it's so exciting.”

“I don't care whether it's in the L part or not. There's plenty of room in the great barn of a place everywhere.”

“But what about his taking care of the business in Boston?” suggested Eunice, looking at her father.

“There's no hurry about that.”

“And about the excursion to aesthetic centres abroad?” Minnie added.

“That could be managed,” said her father, with the same ironical smile.

The mother and the girls went on wildly planning Dan's future for him. It was all in a strain of extravagant burlesque. But he could not take his part in it with his usual zest. He laughed and joked too, but at the bottom of his heart was an uneasy remembrance of the different future he had talked over with Mrs. Pasmer so confidently. But he said to himself buoyantly at last that it would come out all right. His mother would give in, or else Alice could reconcile her mother to whatever seemed really best.

He parted from his mother with fond gaiety. His sisters came out of the room with him.

“I'm perfectly sore with laughing,” said Minnie. “It seems like old times--doesn't it, Dan?--such a gale with mother.”

XXXI.

An engagement must always be a little incredible at first to the families of the betrothed, and especially to the family of the young man; in the girl's, the mother, at least, will have a more realising sense of the situation. If there are elder sisters who have been accustomed to regard their brother as very young, he will seem all the younger because in such a matter he has treated himself as if he were a man; and Eunice Mavering said, after seeing the Pasmers, “Well, Dan, it's all well enough, I suppose, but it seems too ridiculous.”

“What's ridiculous about it, I should like to know?” he demanded.

“Oh, I don't know. Who'll look after you when you're married? Oh, I forgot Ma'am Pasmer!”

“I guess we shall be able to look after ourselves,” said Dan; a little sulkily.

“Yes, if you'll be allowed to,” insinuated his sister.

They spoke at the end of a talk in which he had fretted at the reticence of both his sister and his father concerning the Pasmers, whom they had just been to see. He was vexed with his father, because he felt that he had been influenced by Eunice, and had somehow gone back on him. He was vexed and he was grieved because his father had left them at the door of the hotel without saying anything in praise of Alice, beyond the generalities that would not carry favour with Eunice; and he was depressed with a certain sense of Alice's father and mother, which seemed to have imparted itself to him from the others, and to be the Mavering opinion of them. He could no longer see Mrs. Pasmer harmless if trivial, and good-hearted if inveterately scheming; he could not see the dignity and refinement which he had believed in Mr. Pasmer; they had both suffered a sort of shrinkage or collapse, from which he could not rehabilitate them. But this would have been nothing if his sister's and his father's eyes, through which he seemed to have been looking, had not shown him Alice in a light in which she appeared strange and queer almost to eccentricity. He was hurt at this effect from their want of sympathy, his pride was touched, and he said to himself that he should not fish for Eunice's praise; but he found himself saying, without surprise, “I suppose you will do what you can to prejudice mother and Min.”

“Isn't that a little previous?” asked Eunice. “Have I said anything against Miss Pasmer?”

“You haven't because you couldn't,” said Dan, with foolish bitterness.

“Oh, I don't know about that. She's a human being, I suppose--at least that was the impression I got from her parentage.”

“What have you got to say against her parents?” demanded Dan savagely.

“Oh, nothing. I didn't come down to Boston to denounce the Pasmer family.”

“I suppose you didn't like their being in a flat; you'd have liked to find them in a house on Commonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street.”

“I'll own I'm a snob,” said Eunice, with maddening meekness. “So's father.”

“They are connected with the best families in the city, and they are in the best society. They do what they please, and they live where they like. They have been so long in Europe that they don't care for those silly distinctions. But what you say doesn't harm them. It's simply disgraceful to you; that's all,” said Dan furiously.

“I'm glad it's no worse, Dan,” said his sister, with a tranquil smile. “And if you'll stop prancing up and down the room, and take a seat, and behave yourself in a Christian manner, I'll talk with you; and if you don't, I won't. Do you suppose I'm going to be bullied into liking them?”

“You can like them or not, as you please,” said Dan sullenly; but he sat down, and waited decently for his sister to speak. “But you can't abuse them--at least in my presence.”

“I didn't know men lost their heads as well as their hearts,” said Eunice. “Perhaps it's only an exchange, though, and it's Miss Pasmer's head.” Dan started, but did not say anything, and Eunice smoothly continued: “No, I don't believe it is. She looked like a sensible girl, and she talked sensibly. I should think she had a very good head. She has good manners, and she's extremely pretty, and very graceful. I'm surprised she should be in love with such a simpleton.”

“Oh, go on! Abuse me as much as you like,” said Dan. He was at once soothed by her praise of Alice.

“No, it isn't necessary to go on; the case is a little too obvious. But I think she will do very well. I hope you're not marrying the whole family, though. I suppose that it's always a question of which shall be scooped up. They will want to scoop you up, and we shall want to scoop her up. I dare say Ma'am Pasmer has her little plan; what is it?”

Dan started at this touch on the quick, but he controlled himself, and said, with dignity, “I have my own plans.”

“Well, you know what mother's are,” returned Eunice easily. “You seem so cheerful that I suppose yours are quite the same, and you're just keeping them for a surprise.” She laughed provokingly, and Dan burst forth again--

“You seem to live to give people pain. You take a fiendish delight in torturing others. But if you think you can influence me in the slightest degree, you're very much mistaken.”

“Well, well, there! It sha'n't be teased any more, so it sha'n't! It shall have its own way, it shall, and nobody shall say a word against its little girly's mother.” Eunice rose from her chair, and patted Dan on the head as she passed to the adjoining room. He caught her hand, and flung it violently away; she shrieked with delight in his childish resentment, and left him sulking. She was gone two or three minutes, and when she came back it was in quite a different mood, as often happens with women in a little lapse of time.

“Dan, I think Miss Pasmer is a beautiful girl, and I know we shall all like her, if you don't set us against her by your arrogance. Of course we don't know anything about her yet, and you don't, really; but she seems a very lovable little thing, and if she's rather silent and undemonstrative, why, she'll be all the better for you: you've got demonstration enough for twenty. And I think the family are well enough. Mrs. Pasmer is thoroughly harmless; and Mr. Pasmer is a most dignified personage; his eyebrows alone are worth the price of admission.” Dan could not help smiling. “All that there is about it is, you mustn't expect to drive people into raptures about them, and expect them to go grovelling round on their knees because you do.”

“Oh, I know I'm an infernal idiot,” said Dan, yielding to the mingled sarcasm and flattery. “It's because I'm so anxious; and you all seem so confoundedly provisional about it. Eunice, what do you suppose father really thinks?”

Eunice seemed tempted to a relapse into her teasing, but she did not yield. “Oh, father's all right--from your point of view. He's been ridiculous from the first; perhaps that's the reason he doesn't feel obliged to expatiate and expand a great deal at present.”

“Do you think so?” cried Dan, instantly adopting her as an ally.

“Well, if I sad so, oughtn't it to be enough?”

“It depends upon what else you say. Look here, now, Eunice!” Dan said, with a laughing mixture of fun and earnest, “what are you going to say to mother? It's no use, being disagreeable, is it? Of course, I don't contend for ideal perfection anywhere, and I don't expect it. But there isn't anything experimental about this thing, and don't you think we had better all make the best of it?”

“That sounds very impartial.”

“It is impartial. I'm a purely disinterested spectator.”

“Oh, quite.”

“And don't you suppose I understand Mr. and Mrs. Pasmer quite as well as you do? All I say is that Alice is simply the noblest girl that ever breathed, and--”

“Now you're talking sense, Dan!”

“Well, what are you going to say when you get home, Eunice? Come!”

“That we had better make the best of it.”

“And what else?”

“That you're hopelessly infatuated; and that she will twist you round her finger.”

“Well?”

“But that you've had your own way so much, it will do you good to have somebody else's a while.”

“I guess you're pretty solid,” said Dan, after thinking it over for a moment. “I don't believe you're going to make it hard for me, and I know you can make it just what you please. But I want you to be frank with mother. Of course I wish you felt about the whole affair just as I do, but if you're right on the main question, I don't care for the rest. I'd rather mother would know just how you feel about it,” said Dan, with a sigh for the honesty which he felt to be not immediately attainable in his own case.

“Well, I'll see what can be done,” Eunice finally assented.

Whatever her feelings were in regard to the matter, she must have satisfied herself that the situation was not to be changed by her disliking it, and she began to talk so sympathetically with Dan that she soon had the whole story of his love out of him. They laughed a good deal together at it, but it convinced her that he had not been hoodwinked into the engagement. It is always the belief of a young man's family, especially his mother and sisters, that unfair means have been used to win him, if the family of his betrothed are unknown to them; and it was a relief, if not exactly a comfort, for Eunice Mavering to find that Alice was as great a simpleton as Dan, and perhaps a sincerer simpleton.

XXXII.

A week later, in fulfilment of the arrangement made by Mrs. Pasmer and Eunice Mavering, Alice and her mother returned the formal visit of Dan's people.

While Alice stood before the mirror in one of the sumptuously furnished rooms assigned them, arranging a ribbon for the effect upon Dan's mother after dinner, and regarding its relation to her serious beauty, Mrs. Pasmer came out of her chamber adjoining, and began to inspect the formal splendour of the place.

“What a perfect man's house!” she said, peering about. “You can see that everything has been done to order. They have their own taste; they're artistic enough for that--or the father is--and they've given orders to have things done so and so, and the New York upholsterer has come up and taken the measure of the rooms and done it. But it isn't like New York, and it isn't individual. The whole house is just like those girls' tailor-made costumes in character. They were made in New York, but they don't wear them with the New York style; there's no more atmosphere about them than if they were young men dressed up. There isn't a thing lacking in the house here; there's an awful completeness; but even the ornaments seem laid on, like the hot and cold water. I never saw a handsomer, more uninviting room than that drawing room. I suppose the etching will come some time after supper. What do you think of it all, Alice?”

“Oh, I don't know. They must be very rich,” said the girl indifferently.

“You can't tell. Country people of a certain kind are apt to put everything on their backs and their walls and floors. Of course such a house here doesn't mean what it would in town.” She examined the texture of the carpet more critically, and the curtains; she had no shame about a curiosity that made her daughter shrink.

“Don't, mamma!” pleaded the girl. “What if they should come?”

“They won't come,” said Mrs. Pasmer; and her notice being called to Alice, she made her take off the ribbon. “You're better without it.”

“I'm so nervous I don't know what I'm doing,” said Alice, removing it, with a whimper.

“Well, I can't have you breaking down!” cried her mother warningly: she really wished to shake her, as a culmination of her own conflicting emotions. “Alice, stop this instant! Stop it, I say!”

“But if I don't like her?” whimpered Alice.

“You're not going to marry her. Now stop! Here, bathe your eyes; they're all red. Though I don't know that it matters. Yes, they'll expect you to have been crying,” said Mrs. Pasmer, seeing the situation more and more clearly. “It's perfectly natural.” But she took some cologne on a handkerchief, and recomposed Alice's countenance for her. “There, the colour becomes you, and I never saw your eyes look so bright.”

There was a pathos in their brilliancy which of course betrayed her to the Mavering girls. It softened Eunice, and encouraged Minnie, who had been a little afraid of the Pasmers. They both kissed Alice with sisterly affection. Their father merely saw how handsome she looked, and Dan's heart seemed to melt in his breast with tenderness.

In recognition of the different habits of their guests, they had dinner instead of tea. The Portuguese cook had outdone himself, and course followed course in triumphal succession. Mrs. Pasmer praised it all with a sincerity that took away a little of the zest she felt in making flattering speeches.

Everything about the table was perfect, but in a man's fashion, like the rest of the house. It lacked the atmospheric charm, the otherwise indefinable grace, which a woman's taste gives. It was in fact Elbridge Mavering's taste which had characterised the whole; the daughters simply accepted and approved.

“Yes,” said Eunice, “we haven't much else to do; so we eat. And Joe does his best to spoil us.”

“Joe?”

“Joe's the cook. All Portuguese cooks are Joe.”

“How very amusing!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “You must let me speak of your grapes. I never saw anything so--well!--except your roses.”

“There you touched father in two tender spots. He cultivates both.”

“Really? Alice, did you ever see anything like these roses?”

Alice looked away from Dan a moment, and blushed to find that she had been looking so long at him.

“Ah, I have,” said Mavering gallantly.

“Does he often do it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer, in an obvious aside to Eunice.

Dan answered for him. “He never had such a chance before.”

Between coffee, which they drank at table, and tea, which they were to take in Mrs. Mavering's room, they acted upon a suggestion from Eunice that her father should show Mrs. Pasmer his rose-house. At one end of the dining-room was a little apse of glass full of flowering plants growing out of the ground, and with a delicate fountain tinkling in their midst. Dan ran before the rest, and opened two glass doors in the further side of this half-bubble, and at the same time with a touch flashed up a succession of brilliant lights in some space beyond, from which there gushed in a wave of hothouse fragrance, warm, heavy, humid. It was a pretty little effect for guests new to the house, and was part of Elbridge Mavering's pleasure in this feature of his place. Mrs. Pasmer responded with generous sympathy, for if she really liked anything with her whole heart, it was an effect, and she traversed the half-bubble by its pebbled path, showering praises right and left with a fulness and accuracy that missed no detail, while Alice followed silently, her hand in Minnie Mavering's, and cold with suppressed excitement. The rose-house was divided by a wall, pierced with frequent doorways, over which the trees were trained and the roses hung; and on either side were ranks of rare and costly kinds, weighed down with bud and bloom. The air was thick with their breath and the pungent odours of the rich soil from which they grew, and the glass roof was misted with the mingled exhalations.

Mr. Mavering walked beside Alice, modestly explaining the difficulties of rose culture, and his method of dealing with the red spider. He had a stout knife in his hand, and he cropped long, heavy-laden stems of roses from the walls and the beds, casually giving her their different names, and laying them along his arm in a massive sheaf.

Mrs. Pasmer and Eunice had gone forward with Dan, and were waiting for them at the thither end of the rose-house.

“Alice! just imagine: the grapery is beyond this,” cried the girl's mother.

“It's a cold grapery,” said Mr. Mavering. “I hope you'll see it to-morrow.”

“Oh, why not to-night?” shouted Dan.

“Because it's a cold grapery,” said Eunice; “and after this rose-house, it's an Arctic grapery. You're crazy, Dan.”

“Well, I want Alice to see it anyway,” he persisted wilfully. “There's nothing like a cold grapery by starlight. I'll get some wraps.” They all knew that he wished to be alone with her a moment, and the three women, consenting with their hearts, protested with their tongues, following him in his flight with their chorus, and greeting his return. He muffled her to the chin in a fur-lined overcoat, which he had laid hands on the first thing; and her mother, still protesting, helped to tie a scarf over her hair so as not to disarrange it. “Here,” he pointed, “we can run through it, and it's worth seeing. Better come,” he said to the others as he opened the door, and hurried Alice down the path under the keen sparkle of the crystal roof, blotched with the leaves and bunches of the vines. Coming out of the dense, sensuous, vaporous air of the rose-house into this clear, thin atmosphere, delicately penetrated with the fragrance, pure and cold, of the fruit, it was as if they had entered another world. His arm crept round her in the odorous obscurity.

“Look up! See the stars through the vines! But when she lifted her face he bent his upon it for a wild kiss.

“Don't! don't!” she murmured. “I want to think; I don't know what I'm doing.”

“Neither do I. I feel as if I were a blessed ghost.”

Perhaps it is only in these ecstasies of the senses that the soul ever reaches self-consciousness on earth; and it seems to be only the man-soul which finds itself even in this abandon. The woman-soul has always something else to think of.

“What shall we do,” said the girl, “if we--Oh, I dread to meet your mother! Is she like either of your sisters?”

“No,” he cried joyously; “she's like me. If you're not afraid of me, and you don't seem to be--”

“You're all I have--you're all I have in the world. Do you think she'll like me? Oh, do you love me, Dan?”

“You darling! you divine--” The rest was a mad embrace. “If you're not afraid of me, you won't mind mother. I wanted you here alone for just a last word, to tell you you needn't be afraid; to tell you to--But I needn't tell you how to act. You mustn't treat her as an invalid--you must treat her like any one else; that's what she likes. But you'll know what's best, Alice. Be yourself, and she'll like you well enough. I'm not afraid.”

XXXIII:

When she entered Mrs. Mavering's room Alice first saw the pictures, the bric-a-brac, the flowers, the dazzle of lights, and then the invalid propped among her pillows, and vividly expectant of her. She seemed all eager eyes to the girl, aware next of the strong resemblance to Dan in her features, and of the careful toilet the sick woman had made for her. To youth all forms of suffering are abhorrent, and Alice had to hide a repugnance at sight of this spectre of what had once been a pretty woman. Through the egotism with which so many years of flattering subjection in her little world had armed her, Mrs. Mavering probably did not feel the girl's shrinking, or, if she did, took it for the natural embarrassment which she would feel. She had satisfied herself that she was looking her best, and that her cap and the lace jacket she wore were very becoming, and softened her worst points; the hangings of her bed and the richly embroidered crimson silk coverlet were part of the coquetry of her costume, from which habit had taken all sense of ghastliness; she was proud of them, and she was not aware of the scent of drugs that insisted through the odour of the flowers.

She lifted herself on her elbow as Dan approached with Alice, and the girl felt as if an intense light had been thrown upon her from head to foot in the moment of searching scrutiny that followed. The invalid's set look broke into a smile, and she put out her hand, neither hot nor cold, but of a dry neutral, spiritual temperature, and pulled Alice down and kissed her.

“Why, child, your hand's like ice!” she exclaimed without preamble. “We used to say that came from a warm heart.”